On Letting Go

Letting go is a common idea within some spiritual disciplines and some so-called spiritual disciplines, it’s also a popular idea within the alternative media scene. From what I’ve seen, it is something that many people who are interested on this idea fail to understand, mainly because they try to force this experience in one fell swoop or because they try to become their guru or emulate someone else.

I feel it’d be way more easy for people to grasp this idea intellectually and also start to actually letting go if they would focus on getting rid of social conditioning first and foremost.

I think this can be something which can be given a really deep analysis with many factors meeting at some point. Right now I’ll just make a brief exploration of some of its layers.

As I said, getting rid of social conditioning in a gradual manner can be very helpful and the following should be contemplated:

We are being attacked, by different means. Attacks which target different dimensions of our Self, sometimes they may attack multiple dimensions. Seemingly there is a double think tactic being used against us and to some extent we go on replicating it.

Examples:

Theories of evolution are in conflict with religious ideas, yet you are being asked to believe in both. But you must not try to solve this conflict, experts in each field will do it for you.

We are being oversexualised by the current out of control narcissistic culture. Since you are a little kid you are being invited to enter sex… yet there are social, religious, and political views which demonize sex, any and all forms of sexual expression are quickly suppressed. Both narratives clash within us and yet we are deemed too stupid to figure it out for ourselves, so the establishment will take care of it.

We are being told how politics is flawed and needs reform while at the same time the cultural spheres will encourage you to worship key politicians as all-mighty godly saviours. You are not supposed to ask why.

We are being told to be against any and all forms of violence, yet you are encouraged to support legal mercenaries in their patriotic mass murder missions. You need no wonder why, it’s the way it is.

So you see, the establishment uses this form of conflicting dialectic to obfuscate and confuse the “unworthy”, it get’s even more nasty because both sides of the dialectic are usually full of shit. This dynamic is repeated over and over again – it has been going on for what? millennia? millions of years?- to the point where severe trauma is created within the tormented individual, the repetition of this practice so frequent that at some point the population will just go on replicating it. Indeed the prisoners watch the prisoners, no one trusts each other… the prisoners themselves will at times crush rebellions which may arise from within their own ranks. Pretty pathetic and sad.

To a large extent this stuff creates a heavy inner conflict and people just go trough life completely unaware of their inner predicament, not to mention that people on this planet are on survival mode even if they don’t really need it, one of the reasons for an out of control ego… Indeed making peace with death can be effective for healing, but I may be digressing here.

The emotional part is crucial to understand, again you have a dialectic where people are bombarded with emotional garbage while at the same time they are encouraged to be heartless drones seeking success. Isaac Asimov was a sci-fi writer, but in his Foundation series he created a character called “The Mule”. Some hideous thing and extremely weak in physical terms, but this character had an overwhelming power. He could control the emotions of other beings at will, not even their thoughts, but their emotions. So powerful this tool was that this weakling went on to build a galactic empire.

What’s worse in all of this is that the system doesn’t care about people’s emotional well-being, but it’ll pretend it does so you are provided with psychiatrists and pseudo-psychologists. People who are a mess themselves and who think that helping you to re-adapt to the system is the answer.

Getting rid of emotional baggage is crucial, it even takes a toll on the physical body to a lesser or greater degree. If you observe for a while you’ll notice your body gets tense and your minds tries to shut itself down whenever a link with some disturbing experience is established. Sometimes in can be really difficult to relax your body if you don’t pay attention to this stuff.

Getting into a deeper layer:

It has to be understood that there is something very real which is called over-identification with X idea, object, belief system. There are different degrees and scales to this phenomenon, for example the scientific paradigm is highly materialistic. For modern science the physical body is the beginning at the end, there’s nothing beyond an ephemeral physical existence, the complexity of the human organism and human behaviour are the result of random arrangements of unintelligent atoms. This in turn can cause people to be very anxious and scared about death and in a sense they enter into survival mode.

You can also see people who worry a lot about what other people think about themselves, sometimes this is taken to soap opera extreme where person A knows that B knows that C knows that D knows. Basically people start to become paranoid and see everyone else as the enemy who is constantly plotting against them, the reach of this paranoia is really big, I mean modern society is strongly based on this. When you contemplate this phenomenon you can realize that this is nothing more than mere mind games with one’s self, a play between one’s own insecurities. Most of the time there’s nothing going on with other people and even if they were thinking ugly things about you… what does it matter? But then you have a problem… most people know that A knows that B knows that C knows, ad infinitum.

Basically there’s a sense of false identity which at first is created by a neurotic society and its cultural paradigms, a constant rain of external stimuli where self-contemplation is seen as stupid and cheesy. This is something which many teachers have missed in ages past, not so much because they were oblivious to it, but because there was a lack of terminology. This is where psychology comes in and the process of getting to know those artificial and useless concepts/ideas becomes easier. It is much more easier when psychology is implemented than when you just go to some far away eastern land and sit with some teacher and become extremely frustrated because you don’t have a liberating experience.

Now you have to be careful when you talk about identification with the mind and body, I think the term over-identification is better suited to describe it. What some teachings seek to communicate is that your body is not the ultimate reality and that your mind is just one of the aspects of Self, but it is out of control. This is where the western esoteric tradition works for me because it is known that your body is the tomb of your soul, yet it is extremely sacred. Meaning that your body is very useful because it is a means to perfect your “higher aspects”. In the western tradition it is idiotic to think the body is the ultimate aspect of humans and at the same time it is idiotic to see the human body as something useless.

There can also be fine lines in the idea of letting go. You could “let go” of everything and become a cold being or you could “hold” everything dear to you and become someone who is obsessed and neurotic. So along the way you have to develop a sort of extra-sensorial skill where you will know what are the things that you must let go and what other things are important to hold close. There are degrees to this because sometimes a certain perception can be really useful for a certain length of time, but there comes a time when this sane experience may become cancer.

Now you must not confuse letting go with escapism, it is one thing to let go of things because you have an understanding of them and their effects and it’s something completely different to pretend there’s nothing holding you down. By the same token it is one thing to embrace ideas or things because you have an understanding and it is something completely different to embrace things because you are trying to fill some void. Again there are fine lines in all of this and ultimately it’s up to the individual to get attuned to all of this.

As for my earlier remark about Death:

Now that’s a way to see Death and I find it to be true, but there are layers to this. In the western esoteric tradition it is known that in a sense Death is a means towards evolution. Everything in the Cosmos seems to go through Death. Things die because only then can consciousness adopt new forms of expression to evolve. An apple seed contains the potential the become a big tree, yet there’s a sort of Omega point within the tree form and so it must die so it can adopt a higher and better form. So the seed of an apple which eventually becomes a tree can become a human and Death is the portal between one form and the other. So you see getting to know the dynamics of Death can also help you to become saner, just as realizing that to an extent you are never born… at least not in the conventional sense which has been fed to humanity through history.